Library Loot

Even though I’ve been enjoying Erika Fatland’s Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan I felt I needed a break. But instead of just reading something from the stack of previously borrowed stuff next to my bed I grabbed more library books. Once again, I have more library books on my hands than I know what to do with. When will I ever learn? 

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot pic and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Sharlene’s blog. 

• Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály – Needing something representing the Czech Republic for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge made this one hard to resist. A murder mystery set during the early years of the Communist regime also made it hard to turn down. 
• The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori – Born in a part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire that’s now Ukraine, Rezzori’s novel of family drama during the first decades of the 20th century looks like an entertaining glimpse into a world undergoing unprecedented political and societal change. 
• Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries – 20th century intellectual giants Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse are all associated with this highly progressive and intellectually bold department at Goethe University in interwar Frankfurt. One of my buddies who’s a professor at the local university is always talking about the Frankfort School. Maybe if I read this book I’ll finally understand what the heck he’s talking about.
• A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez – A novel featuring a protagonist with a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother set in the housing projects in the 1950s and 1960s sounds like a fun adventure. 
• Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging by Alex Wagner – The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father traveling around the world in search of answers regarding her ethnic identity is the perfect companion book to Nunez’s above-mentioned novel. 
• Living with a Dead Language: My Romance with Latin by Ann Patty – After working thirty-five years as a book editor in New York City, Ann Patty said no more and moved to the country. After getting bored with living out in the woods she started studying Latin at the local college. Sounds eerily similar to my life. (Other than I never spent 35 years as a book editor in New York, and I’m not studying Latin at the local college.)